We are here to provide an independent, rather skeptical view of events at Marquette University. Comments are enabled on most posts, but extended comments are welcome and can be e-mailed to jmcadams2@juno.com. E-mailed comments will be treated like Letters to the Editor.
This site has no official connection with Marquette University. Indeed, when University officials find out about it, they will doubtless want it shut down.

Isaac Bashevis Singer fled Nazi Europe in 1935 and came to this country. He married my grandmother, who had escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1940. He went on to become a lauded author and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His family — those who stayed behind — were killed in the concentration camps.

My grandfather was also a principled vegetarian. He was one of the first to equate the wholesale slaughter of humans to what we perpetrate against animals every day in slaughterhouses. He realized that the systems of oppression and murder that had been used in the Holocaust were the systems being used to confine, oppress and slaughter animals. He attributed to a character in one of his books something he believed in himself: “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis. For [them], it is an eternal Treblinka.”

[. . .]

The Holocaust happened because ordinary people chose to ignore the extraordinary oppression and abuse being inflicted on innocents by the Nazis. Millions of people went about their daily lives, knowingly turning a blind eye to the suffering of those they didn’t relate to, those who were deemed “unworthy of life.”

My grandfather often said that this mind-set, whether it manifested itself as the oppression of animals or of people, exemplified the most hideous and dangerous of all racist principles. As Adorno said, “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They’re only animals.”

[. . .]

Because of my family’s history and the gentle guiding force of my grandfather, I learned the sad lessons of prejudice and ignorance and the ways to fight them. I learned that to remember the horrors of the past is not enough — we must apply what we’ve learned and say with conviction, “Never again.” But when we say it, we must mean never again shall we allow this to happen to anyone, for any reason.

Like the victims of the Holocaust, animals are rounded up, trucked hundreds of miles to the kill floor and slaughtered. Comparisons to the Holocaust are not only appropriate but inescapable because, whether we wish to admit it or not, cows, chickens, pigs and turkeys are as capable of feeling loneliness, fear, pain, joy and affection as we are. To those who defend the modern-day holocaust on animals by saying that animals are slaughtered for food and give us sustenance, I ask: If the victims of the Holocaust had been eaten, would that have justified the abuse and murder? Did the fact that lampshades, soaps and other “useful” products were made from their bodies excuse the Holocaust? No. Pain is pain.

OK, so killing Jews is like killing cattle for beef.

Some people looked at Jews and said “They’re only animals.”

Lots of people look at animals and say “They’re only animals.”

The fact that animals are animals isn’t something that these folks think relevant.

The Democrats seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to find anti-Alito witnesses.